


All That Was Lost

by NTheSeventh



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, CW: A bit of Ianthe, Dreams and Nightmares, F/F, Harrow's brain is mean to her, Post-Canon, gtn2019exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22150378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NTheSeventh/pseuds/NTheSeventh
Summary: Harrow's mind is a mess, her dreams are a mess, and her life, such as it is? Also a mess. She never fails to remind herself of this.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41





	All That Was Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [getbreqed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/getbreqed/gifts).



> 1\. Gideon has been trying to escape the Ninth since Harrow can remember knowing her. Harrow is the Ninth. Gideon, her only friend, has been trying to escape her since her very first memories. 
> 
> Anything on this theme? + for Harrow thinking of Gideon as hers + bonus for her feeling guilty about it  
> \+ also for angst - her thinking postcanon about how Gideon can never leave her now and how she is truly the entire future of the ninth (the 201st who didn’t die the first time is in her now too)  
> \-------  
> Well, I was thinking about that prompt and this is what came out. Hopefully it will serve.

Something is very wrong about this.

If someone had told her before coming to Canaan House that she would find herself on her knees in front of Gideon Nav at any point in her life, for any reason, she would probably have laughed bitterly, once an army of skeletons were done tearing whomever it was to pieces. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, Mistress of Drearburh, the greatest necromancer of her generation, humbles herself to no one save God and the girl who lies frozen in the Locked Tomb. 

And yet here she is.

Besides, if she had ever knelt before her, Gideon would have gleefully beaten the shit out of her. Or more likely, she’d have just taken the opportunity to run away. After all, hadn’t Gideon spent almost her whole young life trying, with increasing degrees of cleverness, to get away from her?

And yet there she stands unmoving, looking down at her lifelong enemy with those golden eyes, devoid of pity. And Harrow does not raise a single skeleton. Instead, she kneels on the icy floor, bare to the cold of this place, her robes fallen away to pool around her ankles. It strikes her that the sinew-strung bones and chips of her rosary are twisted tight around her throat like a collar. The other end, loosely held in Gideon’s hand, is the leash. 

“You want something from me, and you’ll ask for it,” Gideon says. 

The dreams have come again, then.

Harrow opens her mouth to speak apologies that she had never gotten to in life. She always does. So much was left unsaid. She needs Gideon to know all of it, even though this isn’t real. 

Instead, she is cut off by a vicious yank on her necklace. It would have been enough to send carved bones scattering in all directions. The sinew holds briefly, but as soon as she thinks that it ought to have snapped, it does, and Gideon Nav wrenches away the trappings of Harrow’s lie, that she prayed the tomb was shut forever. The weapons and vestiges of The Reverend Daughter fall away, inert.

Even without the physical object, they are still tethered to one another by secrets, those she had revealed and those she couldn't yet.

“I don’t need to hear it. I already have an accounting of every sin that’s on your head. Everything you did to me. Everything that was done in your name. So ask.”

Harrow asks, just like every other time she has this dream. 

“What, then? You want to lick your absolution out of my cunt?” Gideon snarls.

Harrow begs to be allowed to serve. In whatever way she might. She does not examine why that always ends up coming across as a sex thing, when she doesn’t even have a frame of reference for that.

“Do you honestly think that if you give enough pleasure to your last living victim..”

Last living…? Gideon’s _dead…_ she _knows_ that. But she can see her alive like this. It is insidious, preying on her need.

“...that it’ll make up for the abomination that you are?”

“I…” Her mind dwells on an image that has haunted her imagination since she learned how she was made: two hundred children convulsing, eyes streaming red tinged tears, with nothing left to breathe but poison. Two hundred lives, all smothered for the shining future of one bloodline.

“For the sheer hell you put me through?”

“You...” The dying children are gone, but that’s no mercy; now all she can think of is Gideon’s own agonized screams as Harrow rips most of her soul out, all to get herself another key. One more secret of Lyctorhood, one step closer to now. She could feel Gideon’s decision to not break the connection and doom her to death at that moment. _Why?_

“Or is this just something you want for yourself? One more layer of power you can hold over me?”

“That’s not…” Blood drips down iron spikes. A dark stain spreads over faded black robes. Empty eyes and rictus grin. Gideon’s heart is impaled and Harrow's heart is shattered in her like blown glass. All that's left of it is shrapnel cutting her insides to pieces. 

“And do you believe, for even a minute, that I would let something like you touch me?”

“You should not have… I ruin everything.”

For a moment, there is something other than the usual hatred and contempt in Gideon’s eyes, she could swear it. Something much softer than the vicious words and the condemnation she expects and deserves. But it is gone in a breath, and then so is Gideon’s image, like so much ash swirling in the chill air. 

_"You aren’t even worthy of_ dreaming _about her,”_ says the voice of her own self-hatred. Her own horrifying caricature of herself has been her constant companion and true worst enemy. _“Think about it! In the end, she got well away from you, didn’t she? Killed herself, just so she wouldn’t have to live in a world that had you in it! And you_ let _her. One more stain on your blood-drenched soul.”_

“That wasn’t why-...” she tries to assert, but she can say no more.

The whole future of the Ninth House despairs, and the illusion breaks completely. 

\---------

Harrowhark the First awakens, alone and aching.

Fresh grief has split her wide open, and all the softer emotions she tries to bury every night are leaking out, like a blood sweat but so much worse. There’s nowhere for them to go now except to pool under her eyelids and fill her lungs with an unwelcome, wracking sob. However much she tries, she can’t even feel that second soul there, burning away like a star gone supernova. Ianthe speaks of it with a ghoulish glee whenever proximity forces Harrow to listen to her ravings. It makes her sick. Worse, it seems to be happening more and more lately, as if the princess of Ida is probing her defenses by finding excuses to bother her. One of these days she will find a way to wrest control of Ianthe’s gaudy, gold-plated bone arm and strangle her with it. It probably won’t be enough to kill her, but it has a chance of getting a point across, that point being “Fuck off.”

Harrow shoves Ianthe right out of her mind. 

Instead, she splays her fingers over all the half-starved hollows of her body, questing for a weak point to reach into and tear and unmake herself like a mere construct. As if she could pull Lyctorhood out from her like an errant bone splinter and be in Gideon’s arms again. It has become a ritual in the past weeks; she has catalogued every inch of herself in search of anything physical which could mean that somehow all of Gideon lies cradled within her, somewhere she could at least reach and touch and know. But her eyes, so obviously looking out of the wrong face, are the only evidence she can find that her only friend, her only whatever the hell, had ever existed. 

The memory of strong arms holding her still in spite of her thrashing, and of a kiss pressed to her brow unexpectedly surfaces in the midst of it all. It’s so vivid that she’s left breathing a little heavily from the shock, as if she had been tossed into icy cold salt water to splutter and flail.

“Where’d that come from?”

The voice that taunted her in her dream was wrong; the _true_ Gideon had been hers, _hers!_ Her last act hadn’t been intended to rip away everything Harrow had just gained, whatever stupid badass one-liner she had said at the time. Somehow she _knows_ this. The certainty of it is _weird._

Nevertheless, here she still is, so ready to hold Gideon, to give back the love she had received, and so alone. She finds herself burdened with the devastating thought that her friend must have needed it just as much, and she had failed to do even that one simple (yet oh, so fraught and complicated) thing. And she has no way to do it now. Even if she were to die at this point and join her across the River, it would be a waste of whatever future the Ninth can have now, of the two hundred sacrifices that made her, and of that one, which seems, absurdly, to hurt more than all the others together.

In dreams, Gideon is eagerly cruel to her, in a way that could only come from Harrow’s own black heart. But at least that twisted part of her allows Harrow to see her, and to hear her voice, whatever words she may say. She prepares for another day of frustration and confusion, resigning herself to the fact that longing will eat her alive until she can dream again.


End file.
